Though Horses is the critics' choise, Easter is more rocking and accessible. It must be a more influential album than Horses for the fans. "Because the Night" was co-written with Bruce Springsteen.
Easter, which I bought recently as part of a boxed set of Smith's first five albums, is quite a fascinating record for its lyrical content. The combination of overtly religious themes with sexual and seemingly nihilistic odes to the power of rock music may surprise some, but it has definite parallels in the Symbolists and Decadents of the late nineteenth century, as shown by Ellis Hanson in his 1997 book Decadence and Catholicism.
Eleanor Heartney in her Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (which I find generally weaker than Hanson's effort) goes further by showing that Smith's lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe was associated with the Decadents and that he was most definitely torn between his strong sense of sin and his natural sexual desires. On this basis it is very possible that Easter really was inspired by Mapplethorpe.
In fact, seeing Easter as a genuine concept album about sin and redemption is to my mind quite reasonable, though I have never seen it thought of as such. The theme of sin as genuine, though, makes me doubt whether Smith was so much a punk as an avant-garde torch singer.
As a serious, though self-taught, social scientist, I known that punk, rather than the 1960s, was when traditional notions of morality disappeared. AC/DC, though seen as less "punk" than Smith, were the band that led this revolution with their lyrics of celebratory violence on "TNT" and "Shoot to Thrill" that was quite unlike anything before it.
Easter, which I bought recently as part of a boxed set of Smith's first five albums, is quite a fascinating record for its lyrical content. The combination of overtly religious themes with sexual and seemingly nihilistic odes to the power of rock music may surprise some, but it has definite parallels in the Symbolists and Decadents of the late nineteenth century, as shown by Ellis Hanson in his 1997 book Decadence and Catholicism.
ReplyDeleteEleanor Heartney in her Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (which I find generally weaker than Hanson's effort) goes further by showing that Smith's lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe was associated with the Decadents and that he was most definitely torn between his strong sense of sin and his natural sexual desires. On this basis it is very possible that Easter really was inspired by Mapplethorpe.
In fact, seeing Easter as a genuine concept album about sin and redemption is to my mind quite reasonable, though I have never seen it thought of as such. The theme of sin as genuine, though, makes me doubt whether Smith was so much a punk as an avant-garde torch singer.
As a serious, though self-taught, social scientist, I known that punk, rather than the 1960s, was when traditional notions of morality disappeared. AC/DC, though seen as less "punk" than Smith, were the band that led this revolution with their lyrics of celebratory violence on "TNT" and "Shoot to Thrill" that was quite unlike anything before it.